The index

Every price below was read on 3 September 2026 from the vendor’s live pricing page over a United States connection, so every figure is US dollars. Sort by day-one cost to see how little the advertised monthly number tells you. Tool names link to our own reviews where we have one; the source column links to the page the price came from.

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The unbuyable month

A monthly price is a promise about a month. On 9 of these 30 pages it is a division sum instead. The vendor takes an annual or multi-year total, divides it by the number of months, prints the answer with a slash and the word month beside it, and sells you the whole term.

The pattern rewards the boldest headline. Hostinger and Bluehost carry two of the three cheapest monthly figures in the whole index and two of the three largest day-one bills among the hosts. The discount is bought with a longer lock-in. SiteGround asks for the shortest term of the three shared hosts and, at $35.88, has the smallest opening bill, even though its renewal rate is the highest here at $17.99.

What a dollar buys, by category

A price only means something next to what it buys. Two of these categories publish a unit you can divide by, so we divided.

SEO tools: a 5.1x spread on the same unit

Six of the eight SEO tools publish a ceiling on tracked keywords, which makes them directly comparable. Divide the monthly price by that ceiling and the ranking inverts. Keysearch has the cheapest headline price in the group and the second-dearest keyword.

SE Ranking Core costs the same as Ahrefs Lite and tracks 2.7 times as many keywords. That single division is why we keep publishing it: nobody selling these tools has any reason to.

Email tools: the free tier is the whole decision

Kit gives away 10,000 subscribers, beehiiv 2,500, Mailchimp and MailerLite 250 each. For a blog under a thousand subscribers the choice is between $0 and about $33 a month for the same job, and the paid tiers only start to separate on automation and deliverability. Twenty of the 30 tools here have some free option. The ten that do not are concentrated in hosting, where there is a real server to pay for, and in the paid-content tools where the free tier would be the product.

How we did this

One person, one day, one rule: a price goes in the table only if it was read from the vendor’s own live pricing page. No figure here is carried over from an older article, a press release or another comparison table.

• Prices were read on 3 September 2026 over a United States connection. Where a page renders its prices in JavaScript, we read the page as the browser draws it.
• Where a vendor shows both a monthly and an annual figure, the advertised price is the one the page leads with, and the alternative is recorded in the notes.
• Day-one cost is the smallest sum that unlocks the advertised rate: the monthly price where you can buy a month, the full term where you cannot.
• Moz Pro could not be read over the United States connection at all, because the domain refuses that request. Its figures came from the rendered page, which prints the currency code beside the number, so the currency is certain.

The currency trap

Several vendors price by the visitor’s country, and they do not all convert. Read from a United Kingdom connection on the same day, ChatGPT Plus shows the same numeral with a pound sign in front of it. That is a real premium for a British buyer at any exchange rate. Grammarly and Elementor convert properly. Elementor’s dollar prices are readable only from the plain-text version of its pricing page, which the site publishes for AI agents. If you find one of these prices quoted anywhere without a stated currency, treat the figure as unverified.

Per-tool notes

Questions people ask

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